


The Unbearable Weight of Being

by Elisif



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Body Dysphoria, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, skin grafting, surgical detail, very explicit discussion of rape/sexual assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 21:44:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12734898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elisif/pseuds/Elisif
Summary: It runs out Maedhros' trauma goes far deeper than Fingon anticipated.





	The Unbearable Weight of Being

It was a miracle, Fingon thought to himself. An ugly, bloody last-ditch scramble of a miracle, but then it was not the first of those to come to his kinsman’s aid in the last week. 

They had been prepared to abandon any and all hope of Maitimo’s survival; his skin was simply too damaged by exposure and injury for him not to succumb to some vile infection. But at the last moment, one of the healers had recalled a scrap of knowledge they had once heard about an experimental procedure in which skin could be taken from an immediate relative and grafted onto the site of damage, saving the wounded from infection and dehydration. He had never witnessed it himself, but believed he could replicate the procedure if necessary. 

After a long family debate of how to handle the situation, his aunt Lalwende had been chosen set out across the lake posthaste with a group of surgeons, an armed guard, and a carefully washed and salvaged lock of his cousin’s hair as proof that the whole story was not merely an elaborate farce. Fortunately, the freezing cold which had so caused Fingon and Maitimo to suffer on their return journey may have secured the latter’s survival now, as the Feanorian’s unpleasant donations (acquired under anaesthetic with armed guards standing over the Nolofinwean surgeons) made it back across the lake undamaged, and the healers were able to operate immediately. Maitimo had needed the procedure over most of his body, but there wasn’t much of him and there was rather a lot of his six brothers. 

He was recuperating now, though maybe that wasn’t the right word. Breathing. Retaining fluids, finally. Fingon sat wearily beside him with his head in his hands as he had done for the past three days, not daring to fall asleep, though the hours dragged and the hard wood of the chair dug into his thighs and backside. 

There was a knock at the door. 

“Come in,” he said, wearily. 

It was Lalwende; she entered unobtrusively, seemingly floating into the room for Fingon could not see her feet below her skirts. In her arms, she carried a small wooden chest, inlaid with a Feanorian star on the top.

“What’s this?” he asked her. 

“This,” she said, laying it gently in his arms, “was Maitimo’s personal travelling chest, as he left it on the morning he was captured.”

She paused. 

“His brothers put it away and never opened it again, but they said to me that you alone had earned the right to go through it and give him anything in there that might be of comfort to him.”

He felt a lump in his throat.

“You do not have to open it now, nephew. You can wait, if it saddens you too much-”

“What difference does it make if it is now or later?” he said, turning his head away. He took the chest, and with shaking fingers, he opened the stiff latches and folded back the lid. 

The small travel-chest appeared to contain only clothes, and plain inner ones at that; it was clear to see they had been tossed aside and crumpled. _ Tossed aside and crumpled because he expected to come right back,  _ Fingon thought terribly. But apart from tangled white shirts and breeches, it appeared empty. 

“Well,” said Lalwen, sadly. “It was worth a look.”

But Fingon had known his uncle and cousin better than that, and he had possessed a similarly designed chest once, and he ran his fingers along the velvet-lined base until he found a small piece of ribbon protruding from beneath. He pulled it upwards, taking the false bottom with it, revealing the treasures concealed beneath. A box of beautifully engraved combs and decorative hair-pieces. A blanket bearing Miriel’s embroidery he knew that Feanor and all seven of his children had been wrapped in on their naming days and at birth. A small framed portrait of Maitimo as a gap-toothed, grinning six year old holding a baby Kanafinwe, who was wearing a christening gown that stretched to the floor of the chair he sat on and holding a teething ring. An infant sized copper circlet that fit in the palm of Fingon’s hand, and a few scuffed medals from children’s athletic competitions in Tirion. Most poignantly, a battered stuffed toy horse he had never seen, in all likelihood because it had been clutched and dragged about to a ragged condition before Fingon himself had even been born.

“Oh my goodness,” he heard his aunt say behind him.

“I made that for him when he was a toddler. His name is Blinky, if I remember correctly.”

Fighting down the lump in his throat, Fingon gathered the embroidered blanket and the ancient toy and walked over to the bed where his cousin lay, shrouded in bandages and looking like nothing human.

He laid Miriel’s baby-blanket over the quilts and furs, tucked the ancient stuffed toy under his cousin’s maimed arm and bent down to kiss his forehead.

“There now,” he whispered, toying with the fraying edge of one of the quilts, then tucking it in further about his neck.

“Now you’re a person again” he whispered to him. “Somebody loved, with a past and possessions and a life and a family and people who love you. I won’t let anyone take that from you ever again., do you understand?”

Not just a body in pain, he thought to himself. A person.  _ A person. _

_ A person. _

 

….

The snowy banks of Lake Mithrim glowed burnished amber and pink between the twisted tar-black pines and the white snow shifted to black mud underfoot as Fingon slowed his mount to a trot and rode into the outskirts of the Feanorian encampment, hot breath from exertion dampening his cheeks as the cold truly struck him and he pulled off his gloves with his teeth. 

The guards standing watch lowered their bows and shouted greetings at him as he approached; he was a frequent enough visitor and admired enough for his rescue of their lord that they never stopped him on visits like these. 

It had been nearly a year now, and bad as Fingon felt about leaving his cousin for longer and longer periods, he had his own responsibilities and duties to tend to, and could only jaunt back and forth across the lake so often. 

Coming in sight of the main house the brothers had built themselves and the crowd that had gathered around its environs, Fingon leapt easily from the palfrey’s back, and handed his coat over one of the servants. 

“Send word to Nelyo that I am here and I wish to see him, so soon as I have washed and readied myself.”

“Yes my lord.”

Preparing himself for a visit likely to be both happy and emotionally taxing, Fingon saw to his palfrey’s needs, then washed his hands and face and headed up the stairs to his cousin’s bedroom, knocked and hearing a sullen  _ “I am ready _ ,” he entered. 

His cousin was standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, completely naked. His head was bowed and there were tears trickling passively down his face; his left hand hung limply at his side, making no effort to conceal himself. 

“You said…,” he said in a small broken voice, “You said that you wanted to see me…”

_ Oh Eru help him, not this.  _

“Oh god, oh Christ Nelyo, that is not what I meant. I’m-“

He ducked over to the bed, grabbed up a his friend’s discarded clothes, walked back over to him holding them in his arms, embarrassedly trying not to see too much. 

“That is not what I meant at all, Nelyo, not one bit alright? I’m sorry I frightened you, it won’t happen again alright? Here, let’s get your clothes back on and then we can talk this through-“

“No!” he shouted and Fingon was startled by the force. 

“Please,” he said, piteously, wrapping his good arm around himself and shivering. “Don’t make me dress yet, I know they’re hundreds of miles away, I know I’m safe here, but that doesn’t change it, I’m still terrified of being punished for wearing clothes, I can’t convince myself otherwise-“

_ I did not prepare myself for this,  _ Fingon thought. But in as kind a voice as he could muster, he continued:

“Alright, alright, I won’t make you then, but come back into bed before you make yourself ill alright? It’s freezing in here, I’ll not lose someone else I love to the cold. Alright? Alright?”

Had the situation not been so upsetting, Fingon would have commented on the improvement in dexterity his cousin showed in limping back to the bed, curling up and burying himself beneath the blankets, all things he would only recently have been entirely incapable of. Sobbing hard, he buried himself until all Fingon could see of him was a small tuft of red hair poking out of the fold of quilts. But when Fingon reached to take his cousin’s hand into his own, his fingers were slapped away and the quilts wrapped even tighter. 

“Go away!” his cousin sobbed. “Just go away and leave me alone!”

“Hey,” Fingon said, kneeling down beside the bed and attempting to gently lay a hand between his blanket-swathed, visibly bony shoulders. “Shh, don’t cry. I love you, alright?”

“No you don’t!”

Maitimo jerked himself away and rolled over away from him even further across the bed, something that could not have been painless. He bit down on his fist and continued to sob, biting his fingers white. 

“You only ever loved me because I was pretty! No one ever cared about anything except my body! None of you ever cared!”

“That’s not true-“ said Fingon, trying to unobtrusively reach in and coax his hand out of biting reach.

Somehow in that instant, as Fingon bent over him, the tension in his cousin’s body gave; but his cousin was not soothed, he either simply lacked the strength to maintain a tense curled position, or worse he was simply allowing himself to be handled and hurt and Fingon did not want to know if it was the latter. He just lay there staring at the ceiling, he did not fight though he continued to sob as Fingon coaxed his fingers apart and away and held them tightly, and that well-rehearsed passivity was enough to make Fingon feel ill. 

“How can you say that?” he said in a small defeated voice, turning to stare bloodlessly at his remaining hand as Fingon clutched it away from him, palm up and fingers curled upon the mattress. Exhaling the words in a continuous string of hurt, he continued:

 “My own mother didn’t even bother to name me after what I was good at, she just saw a shapely body and that was the only reason she cared. Nobody cared about who I actually am…”

“Nelyo…”

 

“You never cared, you never loved me! Not you nor anyone else!”

“Nelyo please, don’t say that,” he said There was a pause, then his cousin looked at him with confronting, bloodshot eyes and horrifyingly continued:

“Then what are you doing all this work for? Why are you trying to fix me? I hear you talking when you think I’m asleep. “will he be beautiful again?” “can you fix this?” “can you fix that?” “will he get his looks back?” “Can you fix his skin?” You just want me to get better and be pretty again so you can admire and touch me and _ fuck _ me for your own pleasure. Why else would you have gone and brought me back from the mountain, I don’t want it, I don’t want to heal  _ I don’t want it.” _

It was the longest stretch of words he had spoken since his return, and the weight of them in Fingon’s chest could have been an anchor worthy to sink Ulmo’s entire fleet. Sheer, sickening horror shot bile into his throat and it was all he could do not to be sick. Who could they all have been so blind, so utterly, breathtakingly  _ idiotic _ ? All these endless weeks and months, telling this pitiful frightened wreck of what once a person it was still beautiful in their eyes when all along, that had been its worst nightmare? And he did think “it”,  for in that horrifying moment he did not see his cousin in the bed, his once-lover and friend; what he saw was very vulnerability itself made flesh before him, pity alone made as tangible as a newborn kitten and entrusted to them all, that still, somehow, they had found a way to torture even as they brought it upon their hearth to suckle. 

But then it was just his friend before him as deprived of care as anyone ever could be, and perhaps it wasn’t right, perhaps it was another hurt, another violation once more, but some instincts were just too powerful to be repressed, and he knelt down and brought his cousin upwards against his chest into the most crushing hug he could and allowed him to sob over his shoulder. And for a few moments, he simply let him be there, for what was there that could ever be said to mend such a hurt? But something had to be said, and so finally he patted his good shoulder and said: 

“Hey, hey, shhh. Nelyo, listen to me. Listen, I am so, so  _ unspeakably  _ sorry. It never occurred to me, to any of us, that that was how you’d feel. We just thought… looks were something that you cared about, that you’d want fixed…”

“Thirty years ago, maybe,” he sniffled, and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. 

He stared at the blankets pooled around his waist and stammered:

“That was... how they did it. They broke me, then they sent me away to heal, then they broke me again once they thought I was pretty again, pretty enough for them to,  _ to _ ….”

He rested his head against Fingon’s collarbone and let out another sob. 

“Hush, hush. You do not have to say it.”

“I’m scared to heal Finno. I’m so, so scared if I stop being sick like this, then people will-”

His lips came apart to speak, but no sound came out. 

“Then people will begin _ touching _ and hurting me again, everyone in Tirion used to find me desirable and so many of them are here now, what if they  _ still do _ ...”

“Shh, shh.”

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and said:

“Do you still want me Finno? Is that why you’re making me heal?”

Fingon swallowed hard and said:

“I don’t right now, no Nelyo. You’re ill and not in your right mind, and I’ve cared for you so intimately these past months… I don’t see you like that at all. I might again someday, but, right now… no.”

To his shock and relief, his cousin fell forward against him in a lopsided resemblance of a hug and began to keen what clearly a cry of utterest relief, for once a dam of happiness burst from him rather than one of pain. 

“Oh thank eru…”

Fingon awkwardly patted his back, not entirely sure how to react. 

“I’m so happy you don’t.”

His cousin lifted his head, and Fingon had to fight hard to stop himself from lifting his cousin’s chin with his fingers, holding his temples, simple loving gestures he knew from hard experience would only destroy this hard-won moment of happiness. So he simple bit down the instincts, faced him though speech without loving touches felt utterly wrong, and said: 

“Nelyo. Hey. You are not attractive to my eyes right now, that is true. But you are dear to my heart, alright?”

“No one in angband ever did anything unless there was something to gain from it. It’s so hard to understand…”

“I know. Listen, alright? You don’t need to be beautiful to be valued. But you also don’t need to be sick to be safe.”

“Truly?”

“No. I swear this to you. I know, I know it must be so wretchedly difficult for you to trust me. I betrayed you and hurt you on the mountain, and in the past months I’ve many times I’ve had to help your doctors go against your wishes to give you the care you needed. I would never trust myself again if I were you, I understand. But please, please know, if you were well enough to leave this room, I would take you to my little brother’s grave, and swear to you on the most sacred ground I know of that neither I, nor anyone else in this camp will ever, ever touch you in a sexual way without your permission, alright?”

He gulped. 

“But I… I’m  _ not _ … The lieutenant. The lieutenant…” 

It was the ugly gulping stage of crying now. Fingon handed him a piece of bandage from the night table on which to blow his nose. 

“Hush. Hush, shhh…”

“He used to tell me that mother and father should have drowned me. That I was their greatest shame and that they should have killed me and tried again for an artist like a real noldor… That it was the only thing I was good for... ”

“Nelyo, Nelyo. This is the lieutenant’s poison, all of it. None of it was true then, and none of it is true now.”

But how mercilessly well-aimed those arrows had been, Fingon thought to himself. Morgoth’s fae knew just where to strike to allow a person’s entire being to implode; he thought of the viol he had once played with and carelessly left resting on the curve of its back as a child, only for it to collapse unto itself on that one little pressure point that sustained it with tension and with glue. 

“This is why I wanted to die Finno. If I had gone to Mandos, I wouldn’t have had a fea, no one could touch me. I don’t want a body, I don’t want to be anything that can be touched, I don’t want to  _ be _ -“

A lick of spittle caught between his lips, and he gulped as he continued. 

“Sometimes I wish you had cut it off with my hand. Sometimes, I wish you would cut it off now-“

_ Eru no.  _

“Cut off what, Nelyo?” he said as  matronly as possible, trying not to bury his head in his hands or look weary of his cousin’s grievings. 

“My… my…” he choked out, staring down, whispering in utmost, quivering shame, clutching his maimed arm to his chest “It was the only part of me they cared about, like the rest of me was just  _ attached _ to it, is still just attached to it, so long as it’s there people can touch it and hurt me, I hate looking down and seeing it there, I don’t want it on me Finno,  _ I don’t want it _ .”

What could he possibly ever have said after an admission like that? What could words, ethereal, little words which disappeared at once upon the wind, what could  _ words  _ ever do against a violation so great as that? Violation so deep it had seeped like poisoned water from the hand that dealt it into the very kernel of its victim, as though the hand itself had never left?

“It’s started… getting erect again lately, by accident sometimes, and when it does, i just lie there and cry and wait for it to go away, i’m scared to even touch it…”

“Your body is yours, Mai,” he said gently, laying a hand upon his good arm. “It is yours to do with as you wish.”

His cousin squirmed uncomfortably upon the bed. 

“But I don’t want it to  _ be _ mine!” he yelled. Flexing his fingers and staring at them, he continued:

“That  _ thing  _ they turned me into Fin… It  _ couldn’t  _ have been me. It  _ couldn’t _ . So I decided it wasn’t. It was all a dream, it was somebody else it all was happening to… anything, anything  to keep it all from being real. But then at some point, it became easier to pretend that what wasn't real was everything that came before…”

Eru help him he would need to get blind-drunk after this conversation. Their Sindar allies made a brew using black liqourice that was supposedly lethal; he’d never held any desire to try it before now, but he’d trade anything they asked for a bottle tonight.

“I tried to forget everything just to make it hurt less. I tried.”

He drew a deep ragged breath and continued.

“If I accept that Maitimo and I are the same person… then that means the part where they turned me into what they made me in the end was real. That they were able to do that to me. WITH me.”

_ What was there to say to that? _

“That’s still the worst part. The _ turning into _ . Things that came later were so much more painful, but that… Being handled like an object while I still thought of myself as a person… And I DON’T think of myself as a person anymore.”

“Nelyo…”

“He was always telling me I wasn’t an Eldar anymore, that I was some other  _ thing _ he had created. And I’m NOT. Eldar are,” squirming upon the bed, he said in a mocking voice:

“Perfectly formed and have soft beautiful skin and long beautiful hair and they don’t get sick and they  _ don’t _ ”

“Nelyo-”

“Eldar don’t cry until they vomit, Eldar don’t shit themselves from pain, and they don’t-”

“ _ Eldar are supposed to die rather than bear the shame of being fucking raped because that’s not supposed to be able to happen to them!” _

Furiously, he swung his bound arm, striking a jug of water on the night table and shoving it to the ground where it burst into pieces. There was a moment’s shocked silence, then a loud keening wail as the pain in his stump struck him, and he clutched his arm to himself and began to bite his lip.

“Oh shh Nelyo, shh, it’s alright, let me get you something for that-”

He jumped down from the bed and began to scramble for something to ease the pain with; he found one of the clever cup-shaped hot pads Curufin had devised that heated when shaken. He shook it to set it off, poured numbing oil over it and walked back over to the bed and sat down beside his cousin. 

“This will help,” he said, gently nudging his cousin who sat passively beside him. Nelyo did not move. 

“Nelyo. Will you allow me to touch your arm, or do you want to do it yourself?”

Slowly, painfully, his cousin extricated his arm from his sling and held out the stump, averting his gaze. Fingon gulped as he realised it with chill horror that he must have removed the bandages from it before when he had undressed, though he could not remove the brace and sling unaided. It had been long enough now that they were no longer medically essential, but the implications were sickening. 

“This will hurt for a moment,” he said. He fought down the sickening guilt and bloody images that hurled themselves across his mind as he beheld and held the slowly healing nub of scar tissue, blue veins and mottled bruises that was his fault, _ all his fault _ , and pushed the oil-soaked warming pad over it. Then, as gently as he possibly could, he guided the arm back into its sling against his chest.

But his cousin appeared to be somewhere else entirely for now; he just sat and stared out the window in silence. He was naked again now, and Fingon stared uncomfortably at his shoes trying his hardest not to look at him and think of the things he had said before., 

Quietly, still staring straight ahead, he said:

“I waited to die the first time. I kept wondering why I wasn’t dead yet. I thought it was true...”

He bowed his head. 

“I can’t accept that who I was before and what they turned me into are the same. I just can’t. And if i’m Maitimo, that means that person was me after all…”

He paused.

“Finno, is that box of things you brought me still here? Could I see it?”

“Of course. But wrap this blanket around yourself again, alright? It’s cold in here.”

He gathered up the blankets around his cousin, and once he was wrapped, he went and fetched the inlaid box with the hidden compartment, opened it and laid it upon his lap. 

He stared at it for some time; gingerly, he brushed and touched some of the items with one finger, but no more than that. Quietly, with one finger touching the mane of the tattered toy horse, he said:

“I pretend these are someone all else’s. I can’t bring myself to admit that they are mine. I fight it down like a lump in the throat.”

Fingon laid his hand gently over the back of his cousin’s palm.

“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps we can find some new way for you to think about it. A new way to think of yourself.”

He was only speaking to break the silence; he couldn;t imagine how they could be of any real use, but his cousin appeared to mull on the thought, and eventually he continued:

“It would be so much easier if I had just died. If they killed me truly, and then I was reborn here as an infant with the memories of a past life. I could live with that.”

Fingon curled his fingers a little further around the back of his hand, 

“Then why do you not decide it is so?”

“What do you mean, Finno?”

“You did stop breathing quite a few times while they were tending you when we arrived. They revived you, thanks be to God. But what is to say you did not die then, if only for a moment? Would you feel differently if you knew you had?”

“Then I would not be so ashamed of… of everything. If that were true, then I could say to myself “I’m doing well for someone who’s only a year old”, not “i’m a grown man and I am helpless.” 

_ The milestones have been the same, after all.  _ Fingon thought grimly to himself.  _ First words, first steps, first solid food, first unbroken night of sleep…  _

“Maybe then,” he said, lifting his hand in the most gentle hold he could. His friend's skin felt as fine as paper, “maybe then, it would help you to think like that. You could let go of some of the shame. And then, you could give yourself the permission to feel like a child when you need it, to wait, to heal.”

Maitimo nodded.

“To relearn things from scratch without shame, “ he said. “To be young again.”

Fingon took a deep breath, and held Maitimo’s one hand in both of his own, which had made it so.

“You would decide,” he said. “You would decide how fast you grow, how long it takes. And I will just be your friend until you are grown, until you decide you are. And then, when you are ready, when you think of yourself as a man again, then we will go over it all again together, and decide if we want to be lovers after all.”

“I think,” he said, biting his lip, “I think that… this is what I want.”

His hips shuffled in the blankets; stiffly, he laid himself back down on his side, and Fingon pulled the quilts gently over him. He laid a hand on the small of his back, between his bony shoulder blade and rubbed it gently. 

“Shh, shhhh, “ he said. “Let it go. Let it go. Let even just a little of the pain lift off of you and sleep peacefully for it.”

His back quivered as some painful memory shook him, but when Fingon looked, he was not crying. His breathing had eased, and Fingon let his hand go and stood up beside the bed. 

“Do not tell anyone about what we decided, please,” Maitimo said, blearily with one eye open. 

Fingon swung his cloak about his shoulders. 

“I won’t,” he said. “The only thing I will tell is your brothers not to mention looks and hurt you again.”

He laid a hand beside him on the bed. 

“You need water,” he said. “You are dehydrated from crying. I’ll go fetch some, and then I will get one of your brothers to be with you for the night, alright? Will you be alright if I leave you alone until then?” he asked.

“I was alone for thirty-three years,” he said. “I can manage a few minutes I think.”

“Wait just a little then,” he said. 

And Fingon left, and went to the well, and fetched cold water and a new vessel to replace the one that Maitimo had broken. 

But when he returned, his cousin had already fallen asleep. And he slept so stilly, so undisturbed, out of instinct Fingon leant over him and laid two fingers at his pulse just to know that he was truly still breathing. 

A ragged toy horse, pilled and felted over in parts was tucked beneath his cousin’s elbow as he slept, and Fingon knew, in his heart, that his friend had, at long last, given himself the permission he needed to heal.

  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
